Fabrics obtained by weaving warps and wefts have conventionally been used widely as an industrial fabric. They are, for example, used in various fields including papermaking wires, conveyor belts and filter cloths and are required to have fabric properties suited for the intended use or using environment. Of such fabrics, a papermaking wire used in a papermaking step for removing water from raw materials by making use of the network of the fabric must satisfy a severe demand. There is therefore a demand for the development of fabrics which do not transfer a wire mark of the fabric and therefore have excellent surface property, have enough rigidity and therefore are usable desirably even under severe environments, or are capable of maintaining conditions necessary for making good paper for a prolonged period of time. In addition, fiber supporting property, improvement in a papermaking yield, good water drainage property, wear resistance, dimensional stability and running stability are demanded. In recent years, owing to the speed-up of a papermaking machine, requirements for papermaking wires become severe further.
Since most of the demands for industrial fabrics and solutions thereof can be understood if papermaking fabrics on which the most severe demand is imposed among industrial fabrics will be described, the present invention will hereinafter be described by use of the papermaking fabric as a representative example.
For papermaking fabrics, excellent surface property not permitting transfer of wire marks of the fabric to paper and wear resistance enough to be resistant against abrasion caused by the contact with a machine during operation are very important. Research has been made to develop fabrics capable of satisfying the above-described properties. Recently, two-layer fabrics using a warp binding yarn which is woven with an upper surface side weft and a lower surface side weft to form both a portion of an upper surface side surface design and a portion of a lower surface side surface design and at the same time, has a binding function has come to be used. A two-layer fabric using a warp binding yarn is also disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-52188.